![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() And in her Foreword to the collection Boys Like Her: Transfictions, Kate Bornstein reflects on the pain she would have been spared if, as a youngster, she could have simply told the world: "'I'm a girl, but I'm a boy, I am'" (11). "I am neither man nor woman," affirms Michael Hernandez in a short self-portrait included in Leslie Feinberg's TransLiberation: Beyond Pink or Blue, "I just am" (76). A Midrashic commentary of the seventh century has it that "a man is called by three names: one given him by his father and mother, one that others call him, and one that he calls himself." 1 Here are two contemporary autobiographical articulations of this logic of self-naming. ![]() It is perhaps only fitting that one of the key tenets of autobiography criticism at the dawn of the new millennium-that we become subjects through the workings of a constituting social order within which, however, we can still exercise agency and self-determination-should echo the teachings of the ancients. Subject(ificat)ion, Be/longing, Autobiography We do all this stuff, I think, because we're so afraid of not belonging, so afraid of being alone. The oppression of love, sex, and desire are built into the very nature of the kind of communities in which we huddle. ![]()
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